Tropes Course: Down the Rabbit Hole and Into Portal-World Stories
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Oh

Oh, Toto. I don't think we're in Kansas anymore. Wake up, Toto. You're not in Kansas anymore. Jesus, Ari, you startled me. You are not in Kansas anymore. You are on Pandora. There's a bad draft over there where I usually sit. It's kind of like a big downward gust. It's not exactly Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore, but it's still pretty darn uncomfortable. Like school bowl, buddy? I've got a feeling we're not in Coolsville anymore. Buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, because Kansas...

is going bye-bye. Hello, welcome to the house of our sister podcast of the ringer verse. And we're still, I would say your nexus podcast feed for all things fandom. Joining me today, now that she has gone down the rabbit hole through the looking glass.

Into a sticky, icky, vine-covered portal in a middle school somewhere, it is Mallory Rubin! Ooh, Joanna, curious sir and curious sir! Can't wait for today's pod. I'm so stoked. Today we are here to do yet another installment in our ongoing Tropes course series, which

You can check back earlier in the feed for some of the other episodes we've done on stuff like enemies to lovers, lone wolf and club, magical swords. But today we're here to talk about this one doesn't really have an official title. I'm calling it down the rabbit hole. You could call it not in Kansas anymore. You can call it portals if you want. I don't know, but we're here to talk. Are you using your portals voice as you shop portals? Uh-huh. Blake portals.

A person who I definitely know exists. We're here to talk about other worlds in sci-fi fantasy. And we are inspired today by Ahsoka. We'll talk a little bit more about why. But yeah, we just wanted to talk about a bunch of stories that we love. This is our favorite thing to do on Tropes course. Anything you want to say about that basic idea or your excitement around it, Mallory, before we get into programming reminders, etc.?

I'll issue the caveat that has become a routine part of the Tropes course setup, the Tropes course intro, which is this is not a fully comprehensive, exhaustive list and rundown of every single example of the thing in the history of time. We're talking about some of our favorites. We're talking about some of the most quintessential, some of the ones that feel most central to the stories that we're consuming today. And

I always have fun on Tropes Course Pods. Always have fun prepping, seeing what stories we're going to dive into, making my way through your beautiful Google Docs. This is the one where I was like,

how will I ever do anything with my time again other than just continue to read all of these books that we just had a fresh excuse to open again? Like you read one line, one quote, one passage, and you have fallen down the rabbit hole again. And that I think is one of the things I'm most looking forward to discussing today. Not only all of these beautiful examples, but that really like deeply meta quality of what the stories represent to us as

and what the other worlds or wonderlands inside of them represent to the characters. I'm hyped. Me too. I'm so excited. You and I both had a problem putting down the books last night. It's like, what if I just didn't do the pod and just read to each other? And maybe that's sort of what the pod would be. Maybe that is the pod. Okay. Um...

So that is what we are doing today. Obviously, there's a lot always going on in the larger Ringerverse family. Tonight, we're recording on Tuesday morning. Tonight, the Midnight Boys will be recording their fresh reactions to Ahsoka episode seven. If you're not listening to the Midnight Boys coverage of Ahsoka, what are you doing with your lives? It's gotten really exciting and fresh, especially now that they are like

you know, frostily recording fresh out of the box recording on, on a Tuesday night when the newest episode of Ahsoka drops. So that'll be available to you on Wednesday, mint edition, the minty fresh crew will be here on, uh, over on ringer verse on Friday to talk about the gen V premiere, which I can't believe is already here. That is astonishing. And then of course, Mallory and I will be here on a Friday to do our Ahsoka deep dive, uh,

Next week, though, Mallory, on Tuesday, what is it already time for? Astonishingly, somehow Palpatine returned and somehow it is already time to talk about Loki. Loki season two. Obviously, we'll be talking about Loki season two a few days after that, but on Tuesday at the top of the week, we will have a preview, a primer pod for you. We're going to...

We're going to do something a little bit different for this one, for the Primer Pod. So you'll find out what, in real time, what shape this will take. But as a teaser, this will be focusing on Loki, the character, and why he is such a meaningful figure to Marvel fans. Can't wait for that one. We love Loki. And we didn't get to pod about the first season. I know. And then we'll be talking about Loki together, like, in real time. It's just a thrill. Next week is going to be wild. The Loki Primer.

finale and then just right into Loki season two episode one and then I get to see your face with my face and then your book tour wow what a time post is a baseball all of it yeah how are the others doing fucking great yeah I didn't have to ask because I already knew um Mallory how do all the beautiful bad babies out there and I'm sorry I didn't say hello to you guys what's up bad babies um how

How can they keep track of everything? How can they keep track of everything? Thanks for asking. Here's what I'd recommend. Follow the pod. Follow the pod on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We've got this beautiful, still brand spanking new-ish House of R feed where we're podding twice a week. So follow. You'll see the archive of our former House of R episodes from the Ringiverse feed porting over. It's begun.

The migration, the journey has begun. Steve is doing the Lord's work. Yeah, really. And most likely over the next couple days, the whole archive will be there for you so you can catch up on prior pods if you're so inclined. Those will also still be over on the main Ring of Verse feed for you. So follow along. While you're at it, follow the Ring of Verse on the

on the social media platform of your choosing. If you're on Twitter or X or whatever the hell it's called, ringer versus there. If you're on Instagram, ringer versus there. If you're on TikTok, ringer versus there. And while you're at it, emails, send them. You got something longer than a tweet? You got something longer than an X? See, this is why X doesn't work among many other reasons that we won't talk about right now. I just refuse. I refuse. I refuse.

He can't make me. Send your emails to hobbitsanddragons at gmail.com. Here comes your friendly otherworld spoiler warning. Is it just stories? All stories ever for a tropes course. Some possible worlds we'll visit today. Narnia, Wonderland, Oz, Fillory and further.

Fantasia, The Lands Beyond, Fairy, spelled the really fun way, Neverland, The Quantum Realm, The Upside Down, and oh yes, Barbie Land because Mallory has finally seen the Barbie movie. Finally! Can't wait to talk about that. We'll talk about that at the end of the podcast, just briefly. Let's go to the scope of the trope. So we always like to...

Explain yourself. What are you doing here? Why are we talking about this trope right now? As I mentioned, we're covering Ahsoka on Fridays, and there are sort of two possibilities for inspiration for this episode. The World Between Worlds is a sort of more obvious portal world. We literally, in the show Rebels, watch Ezra walk through a portal. There are portals galore here.

in the world itself. This is very much a portal world, an obvious one. But there's also the question of Paridia. We don't know yet how different. Our heroes have gone to another galaxy entirely. And is that other galaxy entirely just the same as our galaxy? I think that would be a bit of a storytelling shame. And so though we have not seen it,

yet beyond, you know, well, there's zombies there. We haven't dealt with like a ton of zombies in our galaxy. We've seen them before. So are they going to show us something new? Are there different rules there? The different ways it works? Is this going to feel like, you know, because we went through a portal to get here, is this going to feel like one of the other worlds that we will be talking about in our conversation today? Mallory, do you have any prettier thoughts or feelings, expectations?

So many. So many. But luckily we have other pods that people can listen to for that. I'll say, to the question of whether Paridia ends up fitting this description or not, I think it's like there are two potential ways. The pathway to Paridia and Paridia itself. But also, like, whatever...

the quest on Peridia leads to could also end up being our portal into some sort of other world. So maybe that's something that Balin's quest to find the beginning or the power opens or reveals or unlocks. Maybe it is...

something inside of or connected to Paridia or accessed once on Paridia and not just Paridia overall, who can say, we're going to find out quite literally tonight and or a week from tonight, thrilling, what a time to be us. But as you noted, the world between worlds, certainly an apt comp. And we've quoted some of these lines from Filoni before, but this idea, as he said, I don't

know how real it actually is. I don't want to define that for people anyway. And how that quest for knowledge that he's described and that we've seen play out in Rebels and now Ahsoka maps on to what this sort of allegorical or mirror dimension and many different forms and many different stories can unlock for you about your own life, but also how there is often like a benefit of room to play and room to interpret in one of these stories.

I completely agree. Wouldn't be nearly as fun.

Um, so to nail down a tighter definition of what this trope is, we're gonna talk about what it is. And then I have a lot of lists of what it's not. Um,

Yeah, so we're here to talk about other worlds, like a whole universe and setting, preferably one you've accessed through a portal or a gateway of some kind. And that portal gateway door down the rabbit hole idea, I told Mallory when we were first putting this together, I was like, well, for once I won't be quoting Tolkien because Tolkien doesn't count. This is historic. And then I forgot that one of Tolkien's most famous speeches

speeches he ever gave was called on fairy stories. So I have just like a few tiny, tiny Tolkienisms in here. And one is... The first mention of anything Tolkien or Middle Earth adjacent comes on page two of the Google Doc. I'm actually, I'm going to bump one up right here and say, in talking about portals and doors and rabbit holes and all that sort of thing, Tolkien talks about the...

the draw of the forbidden, the prohibition. He says in fairy stories, he says, thou shalt not the gentlest nursery tales. No, it even Peter rabbit was forbidden. A garden lost his blue coat and took sick. The locked door stands as an eternal temptation. So I just like that idea when we're talking about portals,

We're talking about when you see that rabbit hole, when you see, you know, I mean, you can't really control the tornado necessarily, but you know, like a lot of these options involve a conscious choice to step through something that,

Is that in a lot of cases, you're pretty sure you shouldn't, you know, and especially if the protagonist is a young child, but it's like, fuck it. That looks too fun. I'm going to go, you know? Absolutely. That's one of the things that I love about the trope. And there are a number of different subsets and permutations, but whether it is like some sort of

weariness or wanderlust or just more like coming of age thirst for adventure. There is an aspect of a call and an aspect of a quest and there is an active quality. Not always. Sometimes you do quite literally like fall in or something reaches out for you. But typically there is...

a step you take. There is something about your circumstance that leads you to seek and explore. And of course, if that is the origin, then there is just such a rich, ripe

fertile earth for like discovery, whether that discovery is about you, your life, your own world back home, the world that you're in. And of course, in the best version of these tales, those things are inextricable from each other. And all of that awakening is happening in tandem. It's if we think of just, you know, I love that you opened with like all of the different terms or shorthands that you can use to indicate what you're talking about. Is it Wonderland? Is it

Otherworld. Is it down the rabbit hole? Is it not in Kansas anymore? I always think of like portal fantasy and Wonderland as just like not only, you know, Otherworld too, not only like great app descriptions of the thing we're talking about, but as language that has seeped into

a feeling, like much more so than even just the trope, right? If you talk to somebody, you recommend a story as a portal fantasy, or you talk about a wonderland inside of a fictional universe, without you telling that other person a single thing about the world or the characters, they will have a sense of the kind of possibility that awaits and that wonder, what better word could there be for it, right? Of a whole new world of possibility and

This is like what it is to read. This is what it is to fall in love with a fictional universe in the first place. And sometimes there are very fully realized and rich allegorical renderings. Sometimes it's subtler. Sometimes the mapping on hues more closely to something recognizable. Sometimes it's utterly distinct. A lot of these are part of a great coaching tree and you can trace the connections and influences.

The best. The best. The best. And to your point about like injecting Wonderland is part of it, but also the idea of like Neverland or the upside down, this disorientation that comes with all of it. You're underground. You're upside down. Everything is on its head. It's flipped. What are the rules? That's the thing we'll talk about. Like what are the rules? How do I figure out what the rules are? Are they something? And is that part of the process of like either letting go of a rigid idea of what the rules should be

or in some of the, like the more Victorian examples, uh, inserting rule and order back into sort of a chaotic world. Um, yes, I do want to, I do want to mention is Mallory set up top. None of these trips, of course are ever like fully comprehensive. So I will acknowledge a hole or a portal, if you will, in our own, uh,

knowledge here and say that uh the japanese have a whole like rich tradition of these other world stories and forgive my pronunciation but i believe it's called isekai and it means like other world that's what it literally means is a whole kind of story japanese storytelling um

It's a little more specific than what we're going to be talking about today. Usually there's a lot of life and death, like death and reborn sort of storytelling in these stories. Or our hero gets to this portal world and is vastly overpowered compared... It's sort of like Superman being charged up by our yellow sun kind of situation. And then there's also an element, and I'll confess I did not explore it very far, but apparently...

Our hero instantly attracts an otherworld harem is part of this narrative. I'd like to learn more about it. I did not for this pod, but I just want to acknowledge this is a whole rich tapestry that we will not be spending a lot of time in, but that it exists. Let's talk about what it decidedly is not the otherworld story. Because you're like, isn't this all fan art? Don't all fantasies take place in magical world?

Yes, but let's talk about it. So we're not simply talking about one character going somewhere else on the magical map. So like Gulliver's Travels is not a portal story. Frodo leaving the Shire is,

to go to scarier parts of the magical map of Middle Earth doesn't count because you cannot simply walk into a magical... I mean, sometimes you literally do, but one cannot simply walk into a magical land. That's the point. So Westeros or Earthsea or even the original planet hopping of Star Wars...

That is not portal travel necessarily. The reason we're making a distinction with Puritia is because it just seems significant. We're in another galaxy entirely. It's a whole different thing. So, you know, in those other stories that we love, there's magic there, there's dragons, but that's the status quo of that world. That is the familiar world to our hero versus our hero leaves their familiar world, whether it's literally our real world or another kind of

quote quote unquote ordinary world to go to a different one where the rules do not apply

We're not talking about the underworld. We could because a lot of underworld stories serve a similar purpose, but we kind of want to save that for its own thing. So things like Coco or What Dreams May Come or stuff like that, like that's a rich storytelling tradition. We're greedy and we want that to be its own trip's course. So we're saving that for later. Carve out, Steve, carve out 17 hours for when we're finally talking about the underworld and his dark materials together. Yeah.

Done. Get the Kleenex ready. We're not talking about something we've been talking about a lot on the Doctor Who podcast, which is the concept of hiding in plain sight. Right. So this is something like Harry Potter, where there is magic in this world, you just didn't know where to look. Or Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. Or Percy Jackson, a book that we have both read. Yeah, we have.

We read a book. We're so proud of ourselves. We're not doing hiding in plain sight. Neverwhere maybe counts because he literally goes for a door, but I'm not counting it. And then we're not, this is a tricky one. We're not doing dreamland mostly. It's complicated. As Mallory said, what would be the fun if you could clearly define these things? But stories that I love like over the garden wall or where the wild things are or inception that are like overtly dream space are,

is not what I'm talking about here. And here comes Professor Tolkien again to tell you, I have only one more after this and then we're done. We're putting JR to bed.

Tolkien fucking hates a Dreamland story, and I kind of love that about him. In his On Fairy Stories essay, he said, "...if a waking writer tells you that his tale is only a thing imagined in his sleep, he cheats deliberately the primal desire at the heart of fairy, the realization independent of the conceiving mind of imagined wonder."

I just love that where he's like, that's fucking cheating, guys. It's all a dream. Fuck you. You can keep it. Love that. I love that. Tolkien's like, don't try that shit with me. No. Great stuff. So salty. I did want to shout out, though. Imagine if Tolkien had X. Twitter, you mean? Yeah. If he tweeted? Yeah.

Yeah. Just firing his hot takes on him. Just ripping off takes. No, he would be. This is what I will say about On Ferry Stories, an essay that I reread last night. Incredible. I love Tolkien. You know I do. Everyone in the world knows I do. He needed an edit on that essay. You could have done wonders and trimmed that down for him.

Not that we're one to talk about trimming runtime. Yeah, everyone who's listening to this and knows nothing about my career as an editor and only knows the runtime of our pods is like, what the hell is Joanna talking about? Mallory contains multitudes.

Um, that idea of it's all a dream though. I just want to really quickly wanted to mention, um, this concept of like gaslighting that happens sometimes in these sequels official or not of these stories. So I'm thinking of like, uh, the eighties nightmare fest that is returned to Oz where Dorothy is literally given electroshock therapy because, uh, Auntie Em and uncle Henry thinks she has lost her mind, uh, talking about Oz, uh,

Or in Hook, when Robin Williams as Peter Pan is like, what do you mean? What are you talking about, Wendy? Neverland does not exist. That never happened. You know, and that rediscovering of the wonder of that affirmation that you were right all along and they shouldn't have maybe tried to give you electrical shock therapy. Richard Dawes, what a...

waking nightmare that was. Yellow Jacket is a show we're watching in real time. Hook, I used to watch this all the time when I was a child. You know, every now and then you're just like, this was, you think back on a movie that you watched kind of every two weeks for multiple years. That's one of them for me. I love Hook. We're going to hear from Hook actually later today. And then last but not least, we're not doing time travel. Um,

being trapped in the past or the future, like in stories like a Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's court or outland or something like that, that can serve a similar narrative function to being sort of trapped in a portal world. But why,

why on earth would we rob ourselves of the future time travel tropes course that we certainly plan to do? Question for you. Yeah. If we're not talking about Outlander today, will any other stories that we are discussing today involve saving somebody's life via a handjob? Um, actually possibly. Oh yeah. Oh, what can't you do? Okay. That's all the things.

That we're not talking about. Oh, boy. Great stuff. Let's talk a little bit more about what we already talked about. Subcategories of the trope. Molly already mentioned this a little bit, but there's like two kind of main categories that we want to talk about. Like the idea of something that's fantastically grounded. So there's like wizards and dragons and everything's like real and there's clear internal logic, firm rules, right?

My favorite. Internal logic and firm rules. Love that. Usually confirm not to be a dream. Be like, am I dreaming? And then like someone pinches you and you're like, no, I'm awake or something like that. Or you take an object from that world back into your real world and it still exists. Something like that. That's one kind of escape. So like, yeah, there's weird stuff going on, but it all makes sense inside the world.

And then there's dreamlike fantasy worlds. And this is where things get a lot fuzzier, right? In terms of like, I said, we're not talking about dreamy, but there's dreamlike worlds where, you know, we're vibing. We're vibing in these worlds, right? These are usually like very allegorical in nature. Dream logic often applies. Like doors might lead to different places depending on where and when and how you open them, etc.,

Wonderland. Alice in Wonderland is a big one here because you might be like, Joanna, why is Wonderland allowed when Alice is dreaming the whole time? And my rebuttal to that, because I knew you'd be saying that at home, folks, is that at the end of Through the Looking Glass...

when Alice comes back to the real world and like wakes up shaking her cat, she has this question of like, was I dreaming or was the red King? Was I dreaming the red King or was the red King dreaming me one for the philosophers actually out of us in wonderland. So I might argue that if Alice is in fact a figure inside the red King's dream, then her, then she's just like nestled in a, another frame narrative. And this is actually not all a dream. That's my excuse for why Alice is here.

But stuff like the labyrinth, the classic Jim Henson, Jennifer Connelly, David Bowie joint where a girl goes to rescue her baby brother from the Goblin Gang. That idea of rule and order being amiss. Steve, can we hear this clip? Not fair. You say that so often. I wonder what your basis for comparison is.

And that's when he just fucked with time. We'll talk about time a little later on, but he just like moved the clock around. She's got, she's on the clock ticking clock and he just moved up a couple hours because he can't because he's a lot of clocks and a lot of time dilation in these stories. What are you going to do? Under the,

Under the dream, like, fantasy world, I will just mention, like, the spirit realms. This one is also, like, a little bit harder to define necessarily, but stuff like Miyazaki's great film Spirited Away, the spirit realm that exists in Avatar and Korra, in Neil Gaiman's American Gods, the spirit realm is called The Backstage. I've always loved that. And I'm going to shout out Brando Sandoz Cosmere as a sort of, like, spirit realm. Do you have any... Have you ever wanted to go to the... If you were to pick a spirit realm, where would you go? Oh, and what would you eat? Ooh!

I would probably make my way into the Avatar universe. Yeah. Just always seemed like an absolute delight. Bug knows what's up. Yeah. What about you? Which would your choice be? I mean, you're in your hardcore Brando Sandoz discovery phase right now. Has that swayed you? I am in the Brando Sandoz discovery stage, but I think that, like, spirited away. I don't know. I've always wanted to go there. Sometimes I dream I'm there. Oh. Yeah. It's true. How nice. Yeah.

It's Miyazaki season. I always feel like fall is Miyazaki season. So, you know, throw on some Kiki's Liberty Service and just enjoy yourself. The origin of this trope, which we're just going to zoom through really quickly. We've always, in our storytelling, obviously, always had ideas of other worlds that have manifested in a million different ways. If it's like Olympus or Asgard, where the gods live, the pantheon of...

Heaven or hell, you know, if you believe in that binary. Please forget my pronunciation, but like Viraj or Chinvat, I believe, are like other worlds that exist in other like more Eastern storytelling traditions. We've always believed in this idea of elsewhere. The Irish have a very strong tradition of this.

because we're going to talk about fairies in a second. But the Imran tradition, which is usually involved getting in a boat and going elsewhere in the world and discovering a fantastical place. Something I thought was really interesting I was reading in one of the various essays that I read is this idea of like when we decided to circumnavigate the world, when we finally decided to go out to all corners and actually plot what the world was sort of starting the 16th century and

That's when we really started to move from this Imran story tradition of get in a boat and go somewhere fantastical to...

Oh, no, we've been everywhere. And it's all just like here. So then we then we start to create these portals, these fairy rings, these other things that will transport you to elsewhere. You know, like what actually used to rest in the corner or the edge of a map. You know, there'll be dragons like the possibility was here. And then once it wasn't, we had to find it elsewhere. Yeah.

I also, I cannot confirm this, but I love the concept of this. So I'm just going to share it. And when I say I read it and then I couldn't find it corroborated anywhere else. There was this idea that like Dreamland in medieval storytelling, that they would set things in Dreamland to excuse like basically continuity errors in their storytelling. Like if their storytelling was shoddy, they're like, but this is set in Dreamland. So don't worry if it doesn't like make sense or line up or whatever. I was like, well, that's, you know, I've heard worse excuses, honestly. Yeah.

And I will. Okay. Last, last, last comment from the professor. Cause we want to talk about fairy F A E R I E as, as this sort of idea as a dangerous place. And I love this. I, I was a little dismayed when I was doing research for this podcast to realize something I had never before, which is that the fairy tradition as it existed, let's say at least like at the Celtic tradition, um,

was sort of warped by the intrusion of Christianity, which might be responsible for transforming the fairies from like household gods and goddesses to evil, wicked things.

But I've actually always loved the idea of the fae and the faerie are dangerous and wicked. Like, the older tradition, they were always sort of tricksters, but maybe more benign tricksters. And then perhaps it's the church that was like, actually, they're closer to demons. And I'm like, what if demons rule, though? That's how I feel about faeries. So here's Professor Tolkien. The last we'll hear of him today, I think. Talking about faerie, F-A-E-R.

R-I-E. He says, fairy is a perilous land and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold. The realm of fairy story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things. All manner of beasts and birds are found there. Shoreless seas and stars uncounted. Beauty that is an enchantment and an ever present peril.

Both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm, a man may perhaps count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveler who would report them. And while he is there, it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost. I've always loved that passage, right?

I think these stories should be a little scary, right? A little dangerous. Absolutely. I mean, if you're following that rabbit, what does that represent? Whether you're in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or The Matrix, it's the unknown. And so does the unknown represent

And that desire to sate some sort of curiosity or urge to like understand and discover always lead to something pleasant and positive. Of course not. What would that, how would that serve to reflect something illuminating about what it means to live a life? So I also like, especially because of the, and this is something we'll talk about a little more later, the number of other world stories that are also coming of age stories that center, and this is not always the case, but often the case on young people, um,

That's part of growing up. Being afraid, facing your fears, something in front of you that challenges a notion you always held. And the idea that a fairy wouldn't just be a fun and pleasant flitting thing, but maybe the thing you needed to figure out how to thwart or evade is kind of thrilling. I love that.

I won't quote him, but Tolkien also elsewhere in that speech is like, no, but he was like, fuck the Victorians for trying to turn fairies into these insipid little garden things. He was like, they should be wild and wicked. Modern examples of fairy stories that we're still reading today. A Court of Throne and Roses is a hugely popular series right now. Takes place in a fairy realm. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, a very dangerous fae in that book.

Neil Gaiman's Stardust, well, a mixed bag, but we're going to the land of the fairy. Coraline also is a classic child-snatching fairy story. And I love, in Terry Pratchett's Discworld, fairy is this like parasite universe ruled by this unhinged queen caught between day and night where creatures of myth are stolen from other dimensions or even people's minds and dreams. Yeah.

Yeah. And just that threat of violence we were already talking about, like off with her head. It's like a pervasive Alice refrain. Yep. There are pirates and crocodiles who might get you in Neverland, you know, like dangers abound. So I love, I love a dangerous portal world.

This episode is brought to you by Peloton. You know, for me, fitness has always been about finding that groove, whether it's hitting the pavement outside, which I've been a lot of, or dialing up a sweat session indoors.

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or the Peloton app. It's like having your own personal coach with you or right at home in your living room. Call yourself a runner with Peloton at onepeloton.com slash running. As we always do, we want to check in with our pal, Joe, Joe Campbell. You heard of him? Let's...

Oh, yeah. You got the first one in this week. I did. I didn't even do the accent though. I've heard it a lot. All right. So which step on the hero's journey do we find a portal world or an unknown world? If you've only ever, if you haven't studied the hero's journey and only ever heard us just constantly bring it up,

You might not know that the hero's journey is often depicted not as a straight line, but as a circle, the story wheel, as it's often called. And often as it's depicted, you'll see the stops along the way on the wheel as we leave home and return home, right? But in the center of the wheel, it is divided between the normal world and the unknown. And it's, I would say two-thirds unknown, right?

one third known. Yeah. Thereabouts. Yeah. In the center of the story wheel. Um, so to earlier point about what does and doesn't count all magical worlds, all portal worlds are firmly in the unknown territory, but not all unknowns are portal worlds. So where are we missing us? Exactly. I am. Yeah. Luke leaves Tatooine to go off on an adventure into the unknown as, uh, Elsa would say, um,

That's not going through a portal, but Alice ditching her boring ass sister to go down the rabbit hole. That's also going into the unknown. Her sister reads books that don't even have pictures in them. Pictures. What are we doing? What are we even doing here? What are we doing? Um,

Do you want to talk about any examples on this hero's journey section? Yeah. You know, this feels like a potentially apt place to talk about a series of books that I absolutely love. The Catherine M. Valenti Fairyland series, Cat Valenti. Five novels, probably.

that center on September, who, when we meet, is a 12-year-old. So, right in that prime, I'm on a coming-of-age journey. These are set in the 1940s in September's world, in our world, in Omaha, Nebraska. And it is instantaneous that September is carried by the green wind. Page one. It is.

instantaneous. The first sentence is once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her parents' house. We know all we need to know immediately. And obviously we don't, right? And we discover quite a bit after that, but it does not take long for us to be swept up right along with September into the hero's journey. And there are a lot of different sections of today's pod

where the Fairyland books would fit beautifully. But the reason I wanted to hit them here is because they do such a brilliant job. I mean, I think the writing in these books is gorgeous, of tapping into that meta quality of how these stories that we read

at home, in our beds, in our couches, with each other at the library are those portals for us. And the characters inside of them, we'll talk about that idea more in a few minutes, are able to experience in their other world what those books give us, right? The call to adventure. That step into the hero's journey. So I'll read you a passage from the first Fairyland book. Hang with me. It's a...

I love it when he reads me. It's not a short one. I love it when he reads me. But it's about this idea. It's about the call, the journey. The trouble was, September didn't know what sort of story she was in. Was it a merry one or a serious one? How ought she to act?

If it were Mary, she might dash after a spoon, and it would all be a marvelous adventure with funny rhymes and somersaults and a grand party with red lanterns at the end. But if it were a serious tale, she might have to do something important.

Something involving snow and arrows and enemies. Of course, we would like to tell her which, but no one may know the shape of the tail in which they move. And perhaps we do not truly know what sort of beast it is either. Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers.

This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books so they cannot get out and cause trouble. Surely she must have suspected the shape of her tail when the green wind appeared in her kitchen window. Certain signs are unmistakable.

But now she's alone, poor child, and there do not seem to be too terribly many fairies about. And instead of dancing in mushroom rings, she must contend with very formal witches and their dead brothers, and we must pity her.

It would be easy for me to tell you what happened to her, why I need only choose a noun and a few verbs and off she goes. But September must do the choosing and the going. And you must remember from your own adventuring days how harsh a task lies before her at this moment.

love this idea that the call isn't just an electric thrilling thing. Of course it is. That's why we call it the call to adventure, but it's scary. It's daunting. It's

The unknown is exciting for the same reasons that it's terrifying. Like what might we discover that changes the way we think about everything we've known to that point? And that can unlock something for you. Part of the power of like the allegorical nature of these stories is that you can learn something about your life when you're looking at it through a different colored lens, right? But it's not all pleasant. It's not all popcorn. And

I think that the idea of, like, glimpsing...

horror amid the wonder is like part of what makes this fairyland series so so brilliant because it's not an either or it's all entwined that's part of the magic of it there's this line pretty early in the book fairyland is an old place and old things have strange hungers and that idea of strange hungers is i think such a perfect summation of what you might find in some sort of

other world if you follow that rabbit. I love that. We are, that was so beautiful. Thank you for reading to me always. We're going to talk later about like this idea of a hungry portal, right? Like a hungry other world that wants to devour something. Indeed. So as we mentioned, yeah, so this idea of, I love this idea of the call to adventure as we've sort of alluded to coming from sort of inside the human heart or head. It's not that

You've got a hologram of a hot princess who happens to be your sister asking for help and met a wizard in the desert. It's not that the neighborhood stoner wizard has come to your door telling you you've got a magic ring.

It comes from some restlessness and dissatisfaction inside of you, which, you know, like all of those heroes share. Luke is staring at the binary sunset for a reason. He wants to go feel adventure. But a lot of these characters don't need anything other than just to see the portal open up before them and decide to go. And I like that the reason we have these ordinary real world frameworks is because

There are a bunch of different reasons, but one of the reasons we have these kinds of stories is to have a protagonist that goes with us into this new world. So we are oftentimes more emotionally invested in these characters because it is like we are journeying together. They are our guide. They're as disoriented as we are. They are figuring things out in real time as we are. And so I really like that. But also we talk about...

spending time in the shire, spending time on Tatooine or whatever the case may be. We often talk about that idea as you need to know what's worth defending. What is home to

that's worth defending? Is it good, freshly tilled earth? Is it, I don't know, blue milk with Baru? Who knows? But like, that there's something important about your home that is threatened that you go out and protect. That's often not the case with these stories. They're like, guess what? Home sucks and I'm bored. It's a real COVID vice. Bored in the house. In the house, bored. You know? Yes. Absolutely. And like, often inside of that, including

I won't spoil the specifics, but just broadly, including in the Fairyland books, there is still room to gain some sort of appreciation and perspective for the thing you left behind. Well, that's part of it. Yes. But not at the expense of the thing you found. It's not ultimately a rejection of that. It's making room inside of your heart for both of those things. Right.

So two quick quotes. One is from one of my favorite books of all time, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norman Jester. If you've never read this story, the story is about a boy named Milo who is gifted a tollbooth and he gets a little toy tollbooth and he gets a little toy car. He drives through it and then he's in his adventure. And here's how we meet Milo in the story. There once was a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself, not just sometimes, but always.

When he was in school, he longed to be out. And when he was out, he longed to be in. On the way, he thought about coming home. And coming home, he thought about going. Wherever he was, he wished he were somewhere else. And when he got there, he wondered why he's bothered. Nothing really interested him, least of all the things that should have.

And what I love about that promising in the Phantom Tollbooth and a number of these stories, you know, in your Fairyland story as well, she's like, I don't want to wash these teacups. What the hell is my life? You know, Dorothy's like, guess what I don't want to do? Chores on a farm in Kansas. Right.

Alice in Alice in Wonderland, loose calories, Alice in Wonderland. Alice says, Alice is beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister. This is the opening line. Very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and having nothing to do. Once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it. And what is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversations? Basically, Alice's sister is like a nonfiction reader, and I'm like, same. Alice, I also don't shop at the nonfiction section, so...

Fantastic. But I love that restlessness that I want, you know, which we see in so many stories is just like all it takes. And I love how appealing that is to young readers because if you're a kid, that idea of maybe you're passing your time alone

I don't mean to sound like really old, but like maybe kids don't feel this way as much anymore because there's constant stimulation. But that idea of like a long afternoon and you get to, to your point, escape into a book, right? I'm here. My sister's reading nonfiction.

I'm really bored. My parents aren't around. No one's paying attention to me. I'm a kid. They don't think I'm worth noticing. My chores suck. I want an adventure. Here we go. Let's go on a journey. Yeah. There are a number of other stories that have come up today that share that through line of the complete and total lack of hesitation. And it's just something you lose when you age. It's just something that ceases to feel instinctive to you. Think about...

I don't mean to sound literally like 100, but think about the number of things every day in our lives as adults, as people with responsibilities, where we're just like... Meetings. What about instead of achieving anything, I just thought about all the things that I don't know how to work through, right? And that's just life. That's just what it is to be a person in the world with worries and cares and concerns and anxiety. And so when you're reading...

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and some of the first passages, it's instant, right? In another moment, down went Alice after it, never once considering.

how in the world she was to get out again. Because why would you think about returning? The whole point is what awaits you. And like one of the things I love about the early passages of Alice is, you know, the fall, the fall, the fall. It's so long. It's so long. Will I ever stop falling? And then what happens right when she does have to make the decision again? There was not a moment to be lost. It's like you could have the impulse. This very strange thing just happened to me.

I didn't think about how I get back. Maybe I should. No. Onward. There's the rabbit. Have to keep hustling. And like, one of the great things about these Tropes course pods and, you know, anytime we get to think about stories that

first came into our life at an earlier point. We talk a lot about the idea of growing with a story or bringing a different perspective to it over time. I was feeling that keenly thinking about these stories because when you're a young person, you're reading them, it's like, fuck yeah, that would be me. And honestly, I felt a little bit sad. I was happy and jubilant and it was exhilarating, but I was also like, am I at the point in my life anymore where I could

doing those things. And that was like sort of a somber feeling, you know? But that's also part of the magic of it is like you become your book, become a different person as you age. And the stories are about that in a lot of ways. It's also baked into a lot of these stories. Like at the end of Alice in Wonderland before Through the Looking Glass, she's

you know, wakes up. If you decide it's all a dream, she wakes up or whatever. And her sister, her boring nonfiction sister, like she sends Alice inside and then she sits out there on the lawn and she starts to dream and she starts to think that she sees all the things that Alice saw, the rabbit, et cetera, all these sort of things. And, um,

And I love, you know, and then she sort of shakes herself out of it. And then she thinks about Alice growing up and never being that child. But then Alice becoming the person telling the story to her young children and stuff like that. So that idea of like the passage of time of like her sister being, we talk about this a lot when we talk about like Susan and Narnia, like a character being too grown up.

To get to go back to the place. Through old Bernard, yeah. In Peter Pan, in the original play, Peter Pan is so hard to track because there's been so many versions. But in the original play, there's this implication that Peter Pan takes Wendy and her brothers to Neverland. They come back.

We meet Wendy's, we get to know Wendy's mother a little bit, Mary Darling, and she's got a secret kiss in the corner of her mouth, just like Wendy. And there's this implication that like once upon a time, perhaps Wendy's mother also went to Neverland, you know? So like it's something we all do and then we all lose at some point. And that, that again, along with like the danger that, that fleeting nature of, of the portal world, can you go back again? It was really fun. Yeah.

On this, we are the reader, the reader is us. There is no better version of that story than the NeverEnding Story.

You know, classic, iconic, obviously 80s film with some diminishing returns on the sequels. But I really recommend reading the book if you've never have by Michael Enda. And it is such a beautiful book, beautifully written. And I'm going to read you a little passage about when Bastion, our hero, steals the book in the first place from the bookshop that will lead him. The book is his portal to adventure.

And this goes out to all the bad babies who are readers and our soulmates, okay? He writes, if you have never spent...

Whole afternoons with burning ears and rumpled hair, forgetting the world around you over a book, forgetting cold and hunger. If you have never read secretly under the bedclothes with a flashlight because your father or mother or some other well-meaning person has switched off the lamp on the plausible ground that it was time to sleep because you had to get up so early.

If you have never wept bitter tears, shut up Mallory, because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired for whom you have hoped and feared. And without whose company life seems empty and meaningless. If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won't understand what Bastion did next, which is a shoplift. Uh,

he shoplifted his adventure. So, yeah. I love that passage so much. And even, you know, even if you don't read the book, I just remember as a kid watching the movie and, you know, your favorite type of apple. I,

Absolutely. He's eating a Granny Smith, by the way. But yeah, when he just like, he hunkers down. We've been waiting all pod for you to bring this up. I wasn't actually, I wasn't going to bring up the apple. I wasn't going to identify as a Granny Smith. But when he like, he like hunkers down, he like pulls the blanket over his head and he's just like, you know, just like chomping on his apple and just like greedily diving into this story that he wants to consume. It is, I've never felt more represented on screen than by good old Bastion, you know? This, I don't,

I don't know why I don't like references or talk about this quite as much as some of the other formative things in my life. But same for me. Like I used to, I love the book. I used to watch this.

constantly when I was a kid, like genuinely maybe more than anything else. It was so fun when Neverending Story was invoked in season three of Stranger Things to just like have the spark to go back to it. And I hadn't in some time at that point. And I was just like,

Again, like you're saying, the passage you picked is so perfect and so beautiful because you can feel that way in any singular moment, but also that's the experience overall of loving stories, of pulling that blanket over yourself and feeling that coziness that the world you're inhabiting can bring you. I love, in general, across the book, the description of the physical thing you're holding in your hand as a...

a glimpse of like everything that awaits beyond. Like there's just no better way to sum up why we love spending our time with these worlds. I love, it's just very early. It's in the, it's in the intro before the first chapter, but I wonder he said to himself, what's in a book while it's closed? And I have that paragraph like I always just love

Oh, I know. It's full of letters printed on paper, but all the same, something must be happening. Because as soon as I open it, there's a whole story with people I don't know yet. And all kinds of adventures and deeds and battles. And sometimes there are storms at sea or it takes you to strange cities and countries. All those things are somehow shut up in a book. Of course, you have to read it to find out. But it's already there. Like, that's just...

That's it, right? That it's just waiting for you. That's your old Nan quote. Yes, it is. Like, it's just waiting for you to like open it for the first time or make your way back to it. That's the wardrobe that we walk through, you know? And like to get to do it anytime we want, anytime we pick up one of those books, it's just the most beautiful thing. I love it. I'm going to reread this. It's been a minute since I've reread this.

Can I tell you one of my favorite NeverEnding Story stories is I bought – back when I had, like – back when I was, like, moving all the time and I had a very small collection of DVDs, the NeverEnding Story happened to be, like, one of the DVDs I had. I would say I had, like, 10 DVDs and NeverEnding Story was one of them. And I was living for, like, two months –

in someone's like sublet room in San Francisco. And two of my dear friends and I had perhaps engaged in too much California legal herbal relaxation. And

They were like incapacitated. They were like laid out. And I was like, oh God, how do I care take for them? And I was like, I'll put on a movie. I'll put on a movie I'll love. And I pull out the number one story. And they both, as incapacitated as they were, like sat up, like bolt upright and were like, what is wrong with you?

We are not watching the never-ending story. Guess where we're not going right now? The swamps of sadness. Oh, no. And so, like, we wound up watching my Eddie Izzard stand-up DVD instead. But, yeah, they were just like, what is wrong with you? I was like, never-ending story. It's a fantastical adventure. They're like, uh-uh. No, no, no. No, no, no. Not right now. Not ready for that adventure. Okay. We want to talk about time.

Yeah. The way that time works in these portal universes, because it is often time dilates in both directions when we talk about these portal worlds. Sometimes you can live lifetimes and then come back and find no time has passed at all. Or sometimes you can go into Faerie and no time has passed at all for you and you come back and everyone is aged. Let's hear a little clip from actually...

Not the Chronicles of Narnia, but Prince Caspian. Steve? You were so tall. Well, you were older then. As opposed to hundreds of years later, when you were younger. Molly Rubin! We're not here to talk about Professor Tolkien. We are here to talk about his BFF. His drinking buddy. Chronicles of Narnia.

Take me, take me through the wardrobe. One of my favorite memories ever is going to the pub where they used to meet and just like having a steak and ale pie and an ale and just being like, what if I never got up? This is the stuff, Lionel. Is that what you said? This is the stuff, Lionel. Oh boy. Chronicles of Narnia. I've heard of it a lot. Uh,

Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, published in 1950. Of course, now if you pick up a box set, that is not what you will see as the first book. You will see The Magician's Nephew slotted at the beginning of your new box set. Controversial. Narnia has come up a few times in our recent pods because, Joe, you've noted how The Wood Between the Worlds is one of the

Filoni inspirations for the world between worlds, this idea of, in the Narnia tales, like this forest of portals into new worlds. But like, what is our first portal? It is the wardrobe. It is one of the most iconic and quintessential portals in all of portal fantasy. And we'll read some passages and talk about that idea of discovery in a second. But to the time point, the allegory point, like when we meet

Peter and Susan and Edmund and Lucy, their children who have been pulled out of their lives because of the war and sent off into the countryside, sent off into this sprawling mansion that they can't wait to explore. They will go on.

to rule Narnia. They will go on to be cast out of Narnia. Some of them will find they cannot return to Narnia. That idea of being too old for Narnia, which is first reality that Peter and Susan have to face. And obviously there have been, there's been much scholarship over many a year about Susan's fate in the Narnia tales in particular. Certainly not the only thing to do.

in the passage of time. Certainly not. But time manifests inside of the story in a couple different ways. There's that literal dilation, right? The fact that when they return in Caspian...

more than a thousand years have passed. Yeah. And this sense that then some of the other stories, like including the magicians, which we'll talk about a little bit later today, that kind of crop up in part in Narnia's image, also then incorporate into their texts. Like Fairyland has, a lot of these stories have this idea of a return. You must leave and then you must come back. Sometimes there's a contract. Sometimes it comes from eating fairy food, which is another thing we've talked about a lot in recent podcasts. Yes.

What becomes the pattern and rhythm of this reality and your relationship between realities? Think of just the number of things, whether it's in Narnia or The Magicians or other stories, that literally involves some sort of clock, the ticking in hook, right? Like, time becomes...

This thing that is moving and changing in a way that you cannot understand. It is like emblematic of the larger uncertainty around you. The unpredictability of the new thing that you have fallen into or walked into or made your way into through a bunch of fur coats that you couldn't wait to rub your face against. Lucy really just loves, loves fur. Weird stuff. Yeah. Well, Mr. Thomas, who doesn't love a little fur? You know what I mean? Indeed. Oh, yeah. Well, okay then.

That took a turn. That took a turn. So... I'm sorry. You're telling me that you watched James McAvoy in The Chronicles of Narnia and we're not like, that's a hot fawn? It is a hot fawn. It's a hot fawn. Love a hot fawn. I love a hot fawn. The quickness with which Lucy initially goes through the wardrobe, it's one of the really fun things about picking this story up again. Oh, I wonder, like...

How long did it take? Were there a lot of conversations about what should happen? We find the wardrobe, we walk through it, and the second chapter of the book is called What Lucy Found There. Like, that idea of discovery is just the beginning. And long before anybody is thinking about what it will mean to be cast out, to be told by Aslan that you're too old, that you can't come back to this place anymore, for you to have grown and lived an entire life inside of this place and then go back and just be a teen again...

You get to feel the crunch of something unfamiliar beneath your feet. Nothing there, said Peter. And they all trooped out again, all except Lucy.

The youngest, crucially, right? That was me interjecting. That was not in the story. Resuming. She stayed behind because she thought it would be worthwhile trying the door of the wardrobe, even though she felt almost sure that it would be locked. To her surprise, it opened quite easily and two mothballs dropped out.

Looking into the inside, she saw several coats hanging up, mostly long fur coats. There was nothing Lucy liked so much as the smell and feel of fur. She immediately stepped into the wardrobe and got in among the coats and rubbed her face against them, leaving the door open. Of course, because she knew that it is very foolish to shut oneself into any wardrobe.

Soon she went further in and found that there was a second row of coats hanging up behind the first one. It was almost quite dark in there and she kept her arms stretched out in front of her so as not to bump her face into the back of the wardrobe.

She took a step further in, then two or three steps, always expecting to feel woodwork against the tips of her fingers. But she could not feel it. This must be a simply enormous wardrobe, thought Lucy, going still further in and pushing the soft folds of the coats aside to make room for her. And then she noticed that there was something crunching under her fingers.

feet. Like, yeah, the sensation that you were just waiting for the barrier and the barrier not coming. And the rules. Well, you know, the rules of the world are is if you walk into a wardrobe, you're going to hit the back of the wardrobe. That's the rules of the world we live in. And so for immediately that to be stripped away. Yeah. And like for you to be unmoored because the thing that is the base of like nature and natural order is,

Didn't happen. You didn't find it. It didn't block your way. The response is not, holy shit, oh no, I'm terrified. Sometimes it is. But what is it here? Lucy felt a little frightened, but she felt very inquisitive and excited as well. That mix, that brew that pushes you forward, even though you're not sure how you could be moving forward.

That's what Narnia is. I love when you say brew. It's like a real Baltimore word for you and I love it. Brew. Brew. I got some cold brew at the yard. Gone to see the O's. Um,

I've always, I always think about how odd the Pevensie children must have been when they come back. I mean, like the series itself engages with that, but just sort of like imagine living to adult, like living for years and years and years. You're the king and queen, kings and queens of Narnia. And then you go back and you're the Pevensies? Yeah.

This is one of the fun things about the magicians and like aging the kids up into the college years. And then it's like, what are you supposed to do? We'll talk about Fillory a little more later, but what are you supposed to do after you discovered that? And that's for kids who actually are magicians in the real world. This is a...

Like, this is a common thing, you know, like Alice becomes a queen. Like, this idea of becoming the queen, the ruler of the land is a recurring idea that I really love. Yeah. What else do you want to say about Narnia?

I think, you know, that's good for Narnia, unless there's anything else you wanted to add. I guess, like, on the time front. Yeah. You know, again, I think, like, we talked a lot already about this coming-of-age aspect and why so many of the stories center on young people. But, like, just to note again that that time dilation or time contract thing is such a through line. Yeah. I was, like, toward the end of the first Fairyland book, this idea of, like,

being ravished and what that means in terms of what you are bound by or to. You are bound to us now, but you will never live fully here nor fully there. Right?

Ravished means you cannot stay and you cannot go. And so we talk a lot about like, yeah, we talk about, we talk a lot about like the gift, the bounty of discovering the awakening, but this is the other side of it. It's like feeling forever like you're never quite at home. Yeah. Heavy. And the passage of time obviously like heightens that. Yeah. To live the life in another place. Yeah.

Every single Call to Adventure hero's journey coming of age story is somewhat adolescent coded. How do you go from a child to an adult? But I think even more so these worlds, these portal worlds that you step through, the young protagonist, like a question you asked sort of in our notes was like, why do so many of these other world stories center on young people? Yeah.

And like my first, like my initial flip response was sort of like the same reason there are so many orphans and fairy stories is like, you can't have children. You can't have parents and authorities there or else these children would not have their adventures. Right. And so to remove them entirely from the world of their family is to allow the child to be the one driving the adventure. Right. But also just thinking a little bit more academically about,

the inception Alice I took this children's literature class in college I absolutely love what a gift and Alice is such a wow I wonder if I can like go sit in on that class now let's go to Davis let's go audit the children's class at Davis it's so good but Alice is such a foundational text in terms of these stories and

so many of these authors are chasing Alice and openly talked about that. Like L. Frank Baum talked about how much he loved Alice when he wrote The Wizard of Oz. J.M. Barrie is chasing Lewis Carroll when he writes Peter Pan. And it's worth noting that both Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie have oddly similar origin stories for why they're telling these stories. They were both

I'm not getting into any of the implications about this. Let's just talk about the facts. They both were very close to the children of family friends. Alice Liddell and the Davies children inspired Alice and Peter and Wendy and John, etc. And...

So this idea of writing a story to entertain a child you know, and to write that story as a portal story to sort of like tell that child, you too could go down a rabbit hole or you too could like follow the star off to Neverland. And so I just like really like that idea.

This is reminding me, I'm literally grabbing a book from the chair behind me because I didn't have this pulled. But what you're saying is reminding me that the dedication in Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is about this idea. My dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you.

But when I began it, I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result, you are already too old for fairy tales. And by the time it is printed and bound, you will be older still. But someday, you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I love that. And also, in theory, this is true of

He who shall not be named Tolkien. This is true of C.S. Lewis. This is true of Lewis Carroll. This is true of J.M. Barrie. That there's like an oral storytelling. These are stories that they told children that they knew or their own children in the case of like Tolkien, et cetera. Yeah.

That they then wrote down, you know, like, the hobbits are childlike so that his children could feel like they were part of an adventure, right? And so to make the child the hero is to delight the child that you were telling the story to. Which, you know, like...

I think my parents did this sometimes, but this is like, it's a really fun bedtime story tradition of like, tell me a story. Tell me a story in which I am the hero. I'm the adventurer. The other thing that I loved. Once upon a time, Maguna went to bed. Exactly. It's great.

The like Lewis Carroll didn't invent the idea of like children being the protagonist of the story. But what he did do with Alice that was so different from what came before in like other Victorian literature is that his story is like it's not a morality tale.

Usually these stories featuring little girls and little boys is about like being good and following the rules and this is your reward, et cetera, et cetera. And he's like, whatever, this is just really weird. And the animals talk, et cetera, et cetera. Let's just go on a weird fun. Let's let our imagination just like sprint. Yes.

And don't worry about what's right and wrong and any of that. And we're just going to have fun. And so like all the people chasing Alice after that, that really took this kind of story into a new direction. Yes, I love that. And the embrace specifically on that last point that like that is for you to figure out on your own. Like it cannot be prescribed to you. Right? Yeah, I love that.

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It's a trap slash you've always been here is what we're calling this next section. This idea that like sometimes when these portal world stories, you're on a mission to rescue someone who's been trapped there. Oftentimes a parent, right?

You were raised without your parent because your parent has been trapped somewhere and you have to go rescue them. And that puts you, the child, into this sort of too soon, maybe thrust into this adult role. An example that I like to think of, even though it slightly breaks the parameters of what we're allowing here, is we're just going to briefly mention that when you think about his dark materials, when you think about the settled knife,

That Will Perry's call to adventure has so much to do with his father, John Perry, being stuck in another world. Now, Mallory and I agree that His Dark Materials is a little bit more of like a multiverse story than it is a portal world story. And part of that, my feeling on that is because both Lyra...

in The Golden Compass and Will in Subtle Knife, we have dual protagonists. So we don't have like one origin world. There isn't one origin world. And so then we're just reality hopping. Right. And it's very different. It is fun. Yeah, we're on the borders here, but it is fun. I'm glad you mentioned the John and Will example. And it is fun to think about like, even though they go to world after world after world, thanks to the tip of that knife, it is fun to think about how the world

based reality and the portal flips depending on your point of view and how like somebody else's normal can be the portal world for you. That's a lovely little thing to think about. Now I'm thinking about their bench and I'm gonna cry. Thanks. I'm always on that bench, Mallory. I'm forever on that bench. Um,

I want to talk about like Wonderland and, and, and the labyrinth as part of this, right? So labyrinth, as I already mentioned, um, we have this character, Sarah, who is 16 year old. She has been asked to babysit her, her brother, Toby, your infant brother, Toby. And she is as petulant and impatient and stomp her foot as any teenager you will ever meet. Um, I,

I read some like original reviews where people just like did not like the Sarah character, but I'm just like, oh, that's just a teenage girl. I don't know what to tell you. That's just like a teenage girl. And she's in this very interesting space of like, she's, she's a theater kid. She's very dramatic. She likes, you know, her mom was an actress, her mom who is now deceased as an actress. So she likes, you know, like wearing her mom's lipstick and just sort of like dressing up in the trappings of adulthood, but actually really wants to stay a child. She doesn't want to babysit her brother. She,

She wants to be the baby. She resents...

that he has taken her place as the child in the family, all this sort of stuff like that. And she says, like, I wish the Goblin King would come and take my brother away forever. She doesn't believe the Goblin King exists. It's just something she says. And then, uh-oh, oops, the Goblin King's here. He's very hot. It's Dave and Bowie. Uh-oh, oops. And he takes the baby. And she has to go and rescue her baby, her baby brother, begrudgingly at first, and then more and more emotionally invested in it.

from the labyrinth, which is the Goblin Kingdom, the center of the Goblin Kingdom. And I love that

For her, because she merges the other side, it's that transition to adulthood. We think about this a lot when we think about Alice, not necessarily because, as we mentioned, there isn't a ton of morality here, like you have to grow up or you shouldn't grow up or anything like that. But the confusion of that in-between space for young girls, particularly this idea of

I'm too big. I'm too small. I don't know what my, you know, Alice's body is constantly changing and this is constantly a source of anxiety and confusion for her. Or like, I will say at first a source of anxiety and confusion for a lot of young girls and for Alice specifically. Um, see if we play this clip. Who are you? I hardly know, sir. I've changed so many times since this morning. You see, I do not see you.

Explain yourself. I'm afraid I can't explain myself, sir, because I'm not myself, you know. This idea of like, who is Alice? This is something she's trying to figure out as she traverses Wonderland. And something I love is that eventually that like, I'm too big, I'm too small. Like when she first grows, the first couple of times she grows too big, whether it's eating a mushroom or eating a cake or whatever, she's like,

It's calamity. I can't fit through this door I need to fit through. I've grown to the size of this house that I was standing in, and now they think I'm a monster, all this other stuff like that. And then by the end, she grows big again at the end, and that is a source of power for her. She's at the trial. The king and queen of hearts are there. And

you know the king she she does not mind interrupting the king of hearts because she's grown so big she doesn't mind anymore and suddenly her her height is the source of her power um at the end of that story and i love that like both sarah in the labyrinth and alice in wonderland find

in their transition into adulthood. Sarah specifically, because Jennifer Connelly is so like perfect as 16-year-old Sarah because she is like that epitome of like right on the brink of womanhood. And David Bowie as this like

hyper-sexualized Goblin King who eventually, it turns out, wants to court her and make her his queen. And if you watch The Labyrinth as a very small child, you're just like, oh, puppets, whatever. And then you watch it when you're a little older and you're like, how was this much...

groin allowed in a children's movie. If you've never seen the labyrinth, he is wearing such tight pants and like the camera lingers intentionally. And he's just sort of like oozing his way through this story. And Sarah eventually like the, the crux to Sarah getting home is her, her,

He's like seduces her via this fantasy sequence at a mask ball. And then there is this ending pitch he makes and her realization. Steve, will you play this clip? You never remember that line. Just fear me. Love me. Do as I say and I will be your slave. My kingdom is great. You have no power over me. I have no power over you. Hear the chiming of the clock?

Chiming of the clock as she figures it out. Amazing. Did you enjoy the synth music? Beautiful. I loved it. Steve, have you added how is this much groin allowed to the soundboard yet? It is now. Thank you.

Yeah, Sarah says, you have no power over me. And Alice says, you're just a pack of cards. And that's how they get out of their respective portal worlds out of Wonderland. The flip side of...

chasing someone you love from your world who's trapped in another world is this idea of a portal world as your true home. This is like a very common fairytale idea of like you're a changeling. You were actually Fae all along and you have been taken home to your people. Depending on your read of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth. Right.

that's that's the more optimistic read of the end of pan's labyrinth is that um our our beautiful young protagonist was actually the daughter of the king and queen and she has gone home that's my preferred ending of that story um but you can read it however you like great beautiful movie very upsetting um anything you want to say on this on this beat before we roll or nailed it

Take me into the next portal. Let's talk about the danger of never going home. So like for a lot of these stories, the common goal is I want to go home. There's no place like home. Dorothy says it's how she gets home. It's not true for everyone. Like Alice just wants to get into this like little garden. She's a, you know, the Pevensies just want to rule. Like there's plenty of kids who are just like, I'll just stay. I'm just going to stay.

on my farm in Kansas. Who wants to go home to that? Dorothy, apparently. But like, but there is always this like call of home like for Alice and this is relatable content Mallory. She's constantly like, I wonder what Dinah is doing. That's her cat. She's like always on always top of mind. She's like, who's feeding Dinah right now? I would like Sabine this week on the so going to be like, who's feeding my love? Sweep over the love cat. This is why I will never get to make

make my way into a portal. I would just like never be able to, I was just like, I never, I can't walk into the wardrobe. Cause what if I end up in Narnia and then Halos, uh, not with me, what would I do? But what if, what if like Dorothy, you can just take your Toto with you, you know? I don't know how hyped Toto seemed about all that, you know? Yeah. You need a basket at least. Um, definitely need a basket. Yeah. Yeah. My, my,

I loved The Wizard of Oz so much as a kid and watched it so often that my grandma made me like a little Dorothy outfit and I had little ruby slippers. Ruby slippers, yeah. And I had a little stuffed Toto dog and I used to like, and a basket and I used to dress up and like braid my hair and then sit down and watch The Wizard of Oz. This is like a grand tradition for me. This is the sweetest thing I've ever heard in my life. I think this is wonderful. It perhaps will not surprise you to hear that I did not have that experience

I was deeply terrified of the Wizard of Oz when I was a kid. Like, I found it actively upsetting. The monkeys? Yeah, more the monkey. The trees? More like the monkey-adjacent stuff than the witch. But, like, I just found it so unsettling. And then it was actually kind of fun in, like, later in middle school and early in high school, you know, when you're learning about all of the symbolism and, like, what an essential text it is to...

give it another chance and find a lot of richness there. And now I really love rewatching it and revisiting it. But when I was a kid, like when my mom would want to watch it, I was just like, this is like, I'm going to have nightmares. Couldn't hack it. I had, I was not afraid of that Wicked Witch, but I had seen the Disney version of Snow White and the crone version

In that film, I had this tree right outside my bedroom window that had like branches that would scratch on the glass. Yeah. And I just like had a strong association that that was like the crone from Snow White outside my window. Being a kid is wild, man. What a wonderland.

This idea, though, of like, if a hero of the story just is trying to get home, I love the tension of like, the hero wants to go home, the reader's like, uh-uh, what? No, we're staying here. I want to be in Wonderland. I want to be down here where the adventure is. And I like this idea of also the cost. You mentioned already the price of, you know, forever bound here, but you can't stay here. These idea of these stories where fairyland...

however you want to define it, has a cost in the never ending story, for example, in the book and also the very shoddy sequel to the original film for every wish Bastion makes, because Bastion becomes this like creator of the universe. He's regrowing it after it's ravaged by the nothing. And he makes all these wishes. And as his wishes come, you know, his imagination is just repopulating Fantasia. But for every wish he makes, he loses a memory of his life as a human.

And for some people, they're like, sounds great. But for most, hopefully, you want to at least remember your cat Dinah or something like that. You know what I mean? I've always loved that because it is a toll. It is a cost. And it's an honest assessment maybe of what you would be willing to give. But it's also such a rich way of illustrating that idea of pouring yourself into the place the way the place is.

poured itself into you and getting to give back to it the gift that it gave you of like creation imagination i was gonna mention Tolkien and being a sub-creator i had to like sit on my hands to not type the phrase sub-creation into this document it belongs i love it

Let's go back to the Phantom Tollbooth because I want to talk about, you alluded to this earlier, it's one of my favorite concepts of some of these stories, this idea of like once you've gone adventuring, there's one verse in the story, again, to talk about Lord of the Rings, like, I saved the Shire, but not for me. You can't go home again. That's definitely a common trope.

We talk about it when we talk about Doctor Who. How is Rose going to go back to the chip shop after this, et cetera? Yeah. But then there's this idea of like, there's this one of like the adventure that you've had. Give me just casually picking up Doctor Who references now. I'm so proud of you. There was a new trailer and I lost my mind. I'm so excited. This idea that your adventure has now seasoned.

You know, the bland porridge that was your life before. And now it is this, to use a Mallory-ism, rich brew for you to enjoy. So this is how to bookend Milo's boredom at the beginning of the Phantom Tollbooth. This is how he experiences the end of the Phantom Tollbooth when he's back home.

whoever left in the toll booth has now taken the toll booth and left a note that says, for Milo, who now knows the way, which I love, always loved. But this is the description. He noticed somehow that the sky was a lovely shade of blue and that one cloud had the shape of a sailing ship

The tips of the trees held pale young buds and the leaves were rich, deep green. Outside the window, there was so much to see and hear and touch, walks to take, hills to climb, caterpillars to watch as they strolled through the garden. There were voices to hear and conversations to listen to in wonder and the special smell of each day. And in the very room in which he sat,

There were books that could take you anywhere and things to invent and make and build and break and all the puzzle and excitement of everything he didn't know. Music to play, songs to sing, and the worlds to imagine and then someday make real. His thoughts darted eagerly about as everything looked new and worth trying. I love this book so much. Oh my God, that's gorgeous.

And the Jules Feiffer illustrations that are in, like, I don't think there's been a print of the Phantom Tollbooth that doesn't have the Jules Feiffer illustrations that are like sort of hand in hand. Milo's sitting in front of his window and the breeze is billowing in the curtains and the curtains almost look like the sail of a ship. Just like he's off on a new adventure, but now he's like in his very own world and home, which I love. Yeah.

And then there's, I was thinking about the end of, again, it's hard to nail down what the end of Peter Pan is because, again, it was like a stage show. Then it was like this, that, and the other thing. Jay and Barry, get your shit together. What is the official ending? But like, there is this very sad aspect of Peter Pan, the boy who wouldn't grow up. That is, the darling children go home and they grow up and they have their lives. The lost boys leave Neverland. Hook dies. Tinkerbell dies. Peter Pan dies.

He's all alone in Neverland. I mean, there's new adventures for him to have, but basically he takes Wendy home and then he's like, I'll be back next spring for spring cleaning. Weird messaging about Wendy and her responsibilities in Neverland. I don't want to go to Neverland and mother all the lost boys in Clean House, but sure. But he's like, I'll have you back for spring cleaning next year, right? So he goes back to get Wendy, brings her back to Neverland, Hook's dead, Tinkerbell's dead. He doesn't remember.

right? Like he has no memory of the loss. He's got like a childlike, like no sense of object permanence in his life, Peter Pan. And this idea of like a world that is leaving you behind because you refuse to leave your portal worlds. Obviously we have a whole syndrome named after it, but one of the ending lines of the stage play, the narrator says when Peter feels

feel both doesn't, doesn't feel the absence of the things that he's lost. It has something to do with the riddle of his being. If he could get the hang of the thing, his cry might become to live would be an awfully big adventure because of course there's this to die would be an awfully big adventure of Peter Pan to live would be an awfully big adventure. Let's go to back to hook and talk about, I mean, so like hook, um, incredible film.

Hook is so much more, is in itself its own sort of classic portal adventure in this vein where Peter, who has come grown up, forgotten Neverland, become like a bad dad and doesn't like his life, is reinvigorated by going back to Neverland, remembering who he is, comes back,

wants to be a great dad, wants to blah, blah. So remember that line from the original stage play, to live would be an awfully big adventure. Steve, will you play this clip? Your adventures are over. Oh no. To live. To live will be an awfully big adventure. That movie rules. Steven Spielberg's like, what if we gave Peter... Amazing. A happy ending that he deserved. I love it. That used to give me chills when I was a kid and I would watch that and hear that. Robin. I miss Robin Williams so much. Um...

There will always be a Neverland is something that J.M. Barrie wrote, as long as children are gay and innocent and heartless. And I love that, this idea of like gay as in like joyful, innocent, blah, blah, and heartless. Because that's like Peter is heartless. He is. There is this like viciousness to and selfishness to childhood. That is something that Peter is clinging to. It's very interesting. There's a...

a great heartless children passage early in fairyland as well like very very early like part of what allows you to have an adventure like this is that state of being all children are heartless they have not grown a heart yet which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror hearts weigh quite a lot that is why it takes so long to grow one i love that

This idea of like a portal story where you never go home is quite complicated because especially if we're presenting a story with a frame narrative of

and like to return from your adventure through the Phantom Tollbooth or to come back up the rabbit hole or whatever it is and to find your world fresh and exciting and new again is like a lovely story to tell a bookish child who likes to escape into a book and then like come back to your world and take that story with you and see the world fresh and new and exciting. But if the story instead is like, never come back, stay in the book. It's better there. Never come home again. Yeah.

I'm just like, that's just not necessarily the uplift I'm looking for from a portal adventure. And ironically, given how prominent There's No Place Like Home is in the Oz story, eventually that series goes on and on and on, and L. Frank Baum eventually just moves everyone to Wonderland. Dorothy and Auntie Em and Uncle Henry just move into Wonderland, and they're like, fuck Kansas. Yeah.

dusty here we don't like it no no shade by the way to any of our kansas listeners there's beautiful spots of kansas but not where not where they lived uh-uh not not i was about to say go jay hawks you know for all of our kansas listeners but i'm i'm married to a mizzou grad so i couldn't possibly couldn't physically say it couldn't possibly should we talk you mentioned fillory earlier should we should we talk about fillory and further and the magicians

Yeah, this is a great time. Yeah, play this little clip to set Mallory up. Is Fillory real? The books have just always felt realer than anything. There are other worlds out there, but Fillory's just fiction. You dreamed of it, didn't you? Fillory. Funny thing about Fillory. You don't really decide when to go. It decides who deserves to. Good scoring. Jason Ralph's voice, that just took me instantly. Yeah.

I love you so much. Me too. The magicians, the Lev Grossman series of novels.

The sci-fi channel adaptation, which is where, of course, that clip is from. You got three books waiting for you. You got five seasons of TV waiting for you. Check it all out. It's a great time. This is a really fun one to talk about here in the context of what you were just discussing about, like, can you go home again? What does that mean? For a couple different reasons, you have the double portal.

You have portal escapism in two forms here. We have characters who read the Fillory and Further books. They're obsessed, just like we are with some of the stories we read, right? They're like the

the central thing in their lives. And then they discover that this place is real and they can go and they can seek and they can quest and they can rule. And also a lot of terrible shit happens too. And one of the things that's neat about the magicians for this pod, for probably some other pods in the future, is that it fits in a lot of different tropes. Like we said earlier in the intro, when you were laying out what is not a part of this trope, this is not a hiding and playing site episode.

But The Magicians is both hiding in plain sight and Other Worlds and other things as well. So you have like, you know, there are a number of overt influences on The Magicians story. And... It was sold to me as Harry Potter that fucks. Yes. Is how it was sold to me in the first place. Yes, exactly. There's like the T.H. White Once and Future King influence on Love, Grossman, which he's spoken about a lot over the years. Obviously, there's the...

Hogwarts, but college with break bills. And that's the hiding in plain sight aspect of like, okay, I'm going for my college interview at Princeton. And then everything that I understood about the fabric of reality changes right in front of me. But there's also...

the Wonderland. There's the Narnia. That's what Fillory is. The Chatwin children are the children that we were just talking about in Narnia. We've got our Ember and our Umber. The Neitherlands is the wood between the worlds, et cetera, et cetera. And this idea of, I don't know how many details to get into in terms of spoiling plot points, but this idea that a character like the Beast...

You also, and we'll talk about this more a little bit later with another story, get into this encroachment aspect, like the creep in reverse of something that can no longer be contained and what happens when a portal exists in the first place. Does it always work the way you want it to? No, probably not. And also like- Doors go both ways. Yes, exactly. You can walk in or out of a door. You can go through a window in either direction. And the question too of like,

Who the beast is and what that eventual reveal like allows us to think about in terms of the way that we mythologize the figures in the stories that we read is like so interesting. I just thought that was like a really cool and clever aspect. But in terms of like the initial, you know, and the first book. So I don't know if you felt this way. This won't probably surprise you to hear this.

At that point in my life, like a person who had read the Harry books, you know, more times than I could count, when I read the first magician's book, I had a really like almost overpowering, I don't want magic to be this hard response to it. Like the way that you have to like learn these languages and move your hands and it's like the creaking and cracking and gnawing of your finger movements to learn to work a spell. Yeah.

It took me so long to acclimate to that, but ultimately in a way that I came to really appreciate and enjoy. And you get this hiding in plain sight, different exposure to different worlds and realities. And Quentin and Alice fucking as foxes when they're down in Brickville South. Yeah, they do. And the trials is just absolutely iconic. And I'll never tire of talking about it. But all of that, all of the years of Brickville's tutelage, all of that comes before Brickville.

So like the pacing of the novels is like really interesting and a little bit, I find slightly disorienting at first just because of what your expectation might be heading in. But once you know kind of how the flow of the world is meant to move, it's really gripping. And yeah,

When Quentin, like when through his eyes, we are seeing the Netherlands and Fillory for the first time, it hits so much of what we're talking about today. Like that escapism, the portal, but also like what changes about your ability to go home again based on what has changed about the way you understand your life. So I'll read a couple passages that are fairly close together in the story. He really hadn't thought it was true.

But now here they were in the city. This was it. The actual Neitherlands or something that looked uncannily like them. It was unbelievable. The most naive, most blissfully happy, sappy dream of his childhood was true. God, he'd been so wrong about everything.

He took a deep breath, then another. It was like white light flooding through him. He didn't know he could be this happy. Everything that was weighing him down, Janet, Alice, Penny, everything, was suddenly insubstantial by comparison. If the city was real, then Fillory could be real, too. Okay, let's zip forward a little bit to Fillory is, in fact, real. One by one, without speaking, they all scrambled up the sloping bank to get a closer look.

It was one of the Watcher Woman's clock trees. Drink, if you're waiting for a clock mention. Bon. Quentin touched the place where the tree's hard, rough bark met the smooth, silver bezel around the clock face. It was solid and cold and real.

He closed his eyes and followed the curve of it with his finger. He was really here. He was in Fillory. There was no question about it now. And now that he was here, it would finally be all right. He didn't see how yet, but it would. It had to be.

Maybe it was the lack of sleep, but hot tears poured helplessly down his cheeks, leaving cold tracks behind them. Against all his own wishes and instincts, he got down on his knees and put his head in his hands and pushed his face into the cold leaves. A sob clawed its way out of him.

For a minute, he lost himself. Somebody, he would never know who, not Alice, put their hand on his shoulder. This was the place. He would be picked up, cleaned off, and made to feel safe and happy and whole again here. How had everything gone so wrong? How could he and Alice have been so stupid? It barely even mattered now. This was his life now. The life he had always been waiting for. It was finally here.

Okay. In our best Arrested Development narrator voice, if you're putting all of that on the place you found in the portal, you're not going to find what you're looking for because that's not the purpose of it. It's not to take you completely out of the life you inhabited before and to make it so you don't have to think about the mistakes that you made. It's so that you're able to eventually face them with newfound clarity. And it is a journey for our God Q from that point forward.

That was so beautiful. I'm just reminded, so like my relationship with the Magician's novels are kind of complicated. I think the world that Grossman built is phenomenal. And some of those things you're describing, like what is it to be in the world, the fantasy world that you've always read about and dreamed about and escaped to in your head. Absolutely incredible. Some of the characters, characterizations I don't love in those books. And then when I became obsessed with,

with the sci-fi television series i would say the first four seasons i'm not wholly endorsing the way it ended but like i would say the first four seasons thereabouts um i think they took a lot of things that sort of like bumped for me on the characters and like smoothed them out and turned them into characters that i was just like wholly here for i would like would

like live and die for Jason Roth as Q. I just like, and, and, and Margo and like all those characters. Like I just, I loved that show. I was absolutely obsessed with it. And, and it was so fun to watch it interact with. It's so, it's such like a fun, like zippy pop culture savvy show that,

And then there's so... And then, like, the high fantasy aspect of it. And then the profound sadness also that pervades it. There is an episode... I talked about this, I believe, last...

When we covered The Last of Us, but there's an episode of The Magicians, A Life in the Day, talking about the passage of time and Fillory, where we see Elliot and Q live out an entire life inside of Fillory and then go back as if no time had passed. One of those little mini stories inside of it. It's so funny.

poignant and sad and beautiful and one of like the best episodes of television I've ever seen. And yeah, and it's a perfect use of a portal trope of that where, where all the time go sort of kind of story. And how do you go back knowing that you've lived that together? Do you deny it? What do you do? So yeah, I, a lot of rich, rich material in the magicians. You talked about the beast about doors going two ways.

Let's talk a little bit more about that. Danger to your home. Portal worlds that, like the nothing, want to just eat and eat and eat and consume. Steve, will you play us our final clip? Upside down. Exactly. But we're not the flea, we're the acrobat. In this metaphor, yes, we're the acrobat. So we can't go upside down? Well, is there any way for the acrobat to get to the upside down? Well...

You'd have to create a massive amount of energy, more than humans are currently capable of creating, mind you, to open up some kind of tear in time and space. And then you create a doorway. Like a gate? Sure, like a gate. But again, this is all-- Theoretical. But what if this gate already existed? Well, if it did, I think we'd know. It would disrupt gravity, the magnetic field, our environment. Heck, it might even swallow us up whole. Science is neat, but I'm afraid it's not very forgiving.

We got a little sci-fi in with our fantasy, Mallory. Take us to Hawkins. Take us to Stranger Things. Yeah, check your compass. See if it's working. Don't go to Starcourt Mall unattended. Yeah, we wanted to talk about this for just a minute because as we've noted a few times today, not every Wonderland is enticing. Like sometimes they're terrifying. Sometimes they're full of tripwire vines and suffocating spores and...

Candy-loving demodogs? Shout out, Darn, I miss you still. Sometimes they are dark mirrors, and sometimes they are overt ones, copies of our streets, our homes, our bedrooms, and sometimes the gateways are not ones that you want to walk into. They're ones that you are hoping to never fall through, hoping that none of your loved ones will ever be pulled through. And sometimes an other world can seek to creep and encroach

and subsume and claim your world. And there's no wonder waiting for you through the crack just to see if darkness where a creature lurks waiting to swallow you whole. We're talking about the upside down.

And, you know, I think it's worth saying, and again, we'll keep the upside down part quick, but it is worth saying inside of this that we are still learning in real time as Stranger Things airs what exactly we are seeing. And we have in the most recent season, you know, we gleaned new information about the shape of this reality before it locked on to this reality.

dark mirror, upside down Hawkins reflection. The character connections. Part of what really is interesting about the upside down is like the center of Hawkins and this idea of like

We're talking about, I'm noticing a lot of Midwestern locales coming up on today's podcast. And, you know, this idea of a place where like, and you hear this a lot across Stranger Things, nothing ever happens here. And then all of a sudden everything happens here. And like your ho-hum existence suddenly becoming the epicenter of everything that

could be possible and redefine our understanding of the universe. Like what a, what a fascinating thing. And also for that to be true, like not only in terms of the place, but the people, like what is one's connection to this place? What is, what is L's connection to this place? The gates. I love with the upside down, the rendering of like communication via thing X, you know, whether it's like the Christmas lights or,

in the first season or the light bright. You know, that was like such a cool thing and the nature of like assessing

How thin is the veil and what opens a crack in the wall? When has Eleven done something that opens the mother gate? When is Vecna's torturous, murderous pursuit opening new gates that can be new access points, but also new threats, like new, new perils and new points of vulnerability for our characters? Yeah.

One of my favorite moments in Stranger Things still to this point, and again, there's a really meta aspect to this because the way that the characters in the story talk about Dungeons & Dragons and D&D is like a way that they build community and like adventure together. Our characters are readers, certainly, but like D&D is another version of book as portal for them, right? Game as portal, community as portal, campaign as portal. And in midway through the first season,

We get this great line that is still very handy from Dustin about the Veil of Shadows from D&D as a comp for what they're discovering. And he says, the Veil of Shadows is a dimension that is a dark reflection or echo of our own world. It is a place of decay and death, a plane out of phase, a place of monsters. It is right next to you and you don't even know.

see it. Now that might run the risk of getting to hiding in plain sight. Something in the corner of your eye. It works here too because that like right next to you and you don't even see it, it may be the demogorgon that claims you if you're nursing your cut on the diving board in Steve's pool. RIP Barb. We, Joe and I, don't miss you. A lot of other people do, but we don't. Injustice for Barb.

So the upside down, it's another one. It's a gnarly world. It's not a wonderland you want to go to. It's not another world you hope to ever find yourself in, but it is there. It is there and you don't even see it until you do. And then you're fucked. Last but not least, we're almost done. And oh my God, we might come in under two hours. What a journey we have been on. Oh my Lord. I'm calling this last section the Uno reverse card. And it is the kind of story where we are worlds, the quote unquote real world that we live in,

is the other world for our various characters, our heroes. So is this a thinly veiled excuse for me to talk to Mallory very briefly about the Barbie movie? Perhaps. I'm so happy. But Barbie Land, Barbie Lee's Barbie Land, she comes to our world.

Our world is like a little different in the Barbie movie, but it is basically, recognizably our world. Enchanted fairy tale, animated fairy tale characters come into our real world. Thor? This is a question mark for me. Because that's the Rainbow Bridge. It's a...

Is it space travel? Is it just the Rainbow Bridge? I don't know if Asgard counts as a portal world, but if it does, then like Thor. Oh, Rumble's a portal. Sure. In a fashion. Yeah, I'll allow it. Classic cinema, Beastmaster 2.

Just wanted to say the words Beastmaster 2 on a podcast where the Beastmaster himself, Dar, comes to 1980s Los Angeles to bump up against mall culture. This is a real 1980s vibe. And then last but not least, it's been a while since I've read the books, but I am almost 100% sure. So let's say 92% sure.

That the Dark Tower series, which I know involves portals and I know involves our modern world and a fantasy world. I believe in the gunslinger we're in a fantasy world. And when we're portaling in later things and when we're bringing in contemporary modern, like modern day real world characters in our, our core world that we start in is not our world. And so I think it counts. Let's just, let's just take two seconds to talk about Barbie. All right.

I finally watched Barbie after my summer of not being able to participate in the most meaningful shared pop culture event in recent recorded human history. And I am so happy to be able to understand...

what everyone has been talking about and to share in this joy and to talk to you about Barb, our beloved Barb. I would like to know, I have not yet been gifted any I Am Knuff merch from any of my cherished House of Arc colleagues, but I guess that's just the holidays are for. We were waiting for you to catch up. Now you shall have it. But yeah, I loved this part of it, that reverse journey and this like,

fallacy of expectation and needing to confront that and see like what it's in century city or elsewhere, what the fabric of the world really is and like how you can impact it. But once you've, once you've glimpsed that even for a second, once you've sat at that bus stop and watch Ken March there and back and had that lovely moment with the person next to you and her paper, um,

How do you go back? How do you go back? How do you go back to just making your breakfast and going through your routine? You can't. You have to try to change something. And Barbie does. I love that movie. I loved this conversation. I love a tropes course. This is really fun. This is a really good one. We will be back, as we mentioned on Friday, to see whether or not Paridia stacks up to these portal worlds. Who knows? No expectations. Once again,

Check out the ringer verse. A lot of great content over there. Midnight boys, pew, pew, uh, mint edition covering Gen V, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, thanks as always to the great Steve Allman on soundboard today, Mallory, you're my portal world. Um, I don't know what that means, but I said it. Um, and we will see you next time. Bye bye. Bye baby. How was this much groin allowed in?